Gaming News

FEZ fans you may be aware of the recent patch which can destroy your save files. Yesterday Polytron has re-issued the broken patch because the cost of fixing the game properly is prohibitively expensive. Polytron said the following on its blog:

“We’re not going to patch the patch. Why not? Because Microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game.

Microsoft gave us a choice: either pay a ton of money to re-certify the game and issue a new patch (which for all we know could introduce new issues, for which we’d need yet another costly patch), or simply put the patch back online. They looked into it, and the issue happens so rarely that they still consider the patch to be ‘good enough’

In the end, paying such a large sum of money to jump through so many hoops just doesn’t make any sense. We already owe Microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform. People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM"

“As a small independent, paying so much money for patches makes NO SENSE AT ALL. especially when you consider the alternative. Had FEZ been released on steam instead of XBLA, the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away too.”

Had Fez been released on Valve’s PC gaming service Steam, the issue would have been addressed within two weeks

Polytron considers the broken patch to be a decent solution, as it fixes many of the issues with the launch game.

“For 99% of people, it makes FEZ a better game. To the less-than-1% who are getting screwed, we sincerely apologize. We know this hurts you the most, because you’re the ones who put the most times into the game. And this breaks our hearts. We hope you dont think back on your time spent in FEZ as a total waste,”

It’s not the first time we’ve encountered tales of developers choosing not to fix games because of the high cost of patching. Back in February, Double Fine’s Tim Schafer revealed that Costume Quest and Brutal Legend suffered a similar fate, despite the backing of THQ and EA respectively.

According to the developer it costs $40,000 to issue a patch. For some devs and publishers that is just too much! Stick with us for more on this as it develops.